Who we are

The Executive Steering Committee for 2018 is as follows:

Tim Armstrong (Royal Holloway)
Tim Armstrong’s research interests include modernism and modernity; American literature and culture; literature and technology; and the poetry of Thomas Hardy. Publications include The Logic of Slavery: Debt, Technology and Pain in American Literature (CUP, 2012), Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study (CUP, 1998) and Modernism: A Cultural History(Polity, 2005), as well as various edited collections. He edited Poems of Thomas Hardy (Longman, 1993) and published a study of Hardy’s poetry, Haunted Hardy: Poetry, History, Memory (Palgrave, 2000). He is general editor of the EUP series Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernist Culture, and is currently working on a project on modernist localism, Micromodernism.

Iain Bailey (University of Manchester)

Alex Goody (Oxford Brookes University)
Alex Goody is Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at Oxford Brookes University, where she also serves as a Faculty Impact Co-ordinator. Her research focuses on modernist literature and culture with particular interests in technology, American modernism, non-human animals, gender and poetry. She is the author of Modernist Articulations: A Cultural Study of Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein (2007), Technology, Literature and Culture (2011) and the forthcoming Modernist Poetry, Gender and Leisure Technology: Machine Amusements. Her current projects include the Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology, an edited volume entitled Reading Westworld and further work on Djuna Barnes’ drama, and insects and Mina Loy.Alex joined the BAMS committee in 2014 and filled the role of Secretary in her first three-year term.

Suzanne Hobson (Queen Mary, University of London): Chair
Suzanne Hobson is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature at Queen Mary University of London. Her research focuses on the literary cultures of modernism and she has a particular interest in questions of religion and secularism in the early twentieth century. She is the author of Angels of Modernism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and co-editor with Rachel Potter of The Salt Companion to Mina Loy (Salt, 2010). She is currently working on a project about unbelief in interwar modernist fiction. Suzanne joined the BAMS committee in 2014 and served her first three-year term as Membership Secretary and Vice-Chair. She was on the organising committee for Modernism Now! The British Association for Modernist Studies International Conference 2014 (Senate House, London) and organised the New Work in Modernist Studies Postgraduate Conference 2016 (Queen Mary University of London).

Lise Jaillant (Loughborough University): Treasurer
Lise Jaillant is Lecturer at Loughborough University. She is the author of two monographs: Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon: The Modern Library Series, 1917–1955 (Routledge, 2014) and Cheap Modernism: Expanding Markets, Publishers’ Series and the Avant-Garde (Edinburgh UP, 2017). She has been awarded a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award for her project “After the Digital Revolution: Bringing together archivists and scholars to preserve born-digital records and produce new knowledge.” The project will run for one year, from 31 March 2017. More information can be found on her website: www.lisejaillant.com

Daniel Moore (University of Birmingham)

Chris Mourant (University of Birmingham)
Chris Mourant is a Teaching Fellow in twentieth-century English Literature and Co-Director of the Centre for Modernist Cultures at the University of Birmingham. His research focuses on the textual histories of British modernism, tracing networks of influence across magazines, periodicals and publishing coteries. His first monograph, Katherine Mansfield and Periodical Culture, is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press. Chris joined the BAMS committee in 2013 as a Postgraduate Representative and is now the ECR Representative. He was on the organising committee for ‘Modernism Now!’ (London, 2014) and ‘Modernist Life’ (Birmingham, 2017).

Sophie Oliver: Web Officer
Sophie Oliver recently finished her PhD on modernist literature and fashion. Her research and writing focus on women’s aesthetic negotiations and reimaginings of capitalist modernity. She has published articles on Djuna Barnes (Literature Compass, 2013) and Jean Rhys (Modernist Cultures, 2016), about whom she also curated an exhibition at the British Library in 2016. For BAMS she was postgraduate representative between 2014 and 2016, before being re-elected to the committee in 2017. Sophie is now a full-time editor at Yale University Press, London, where she develops and project-manages books on art, fashion and architecture.

Sam Rose (St Andrews University): External Relations Secretary
Sam Rose is a Lecturer in Art History at the University of St Andrews. He is currently finishing a book on form, visual culture and modernist aesthetics in early- to mid-twentieth-century Britain (Art as Form, Penn State University Press). He has recently published articles on the present-day status of aesthetics (New Literary History, Spring 2017), ‘close looking’ (Art History, February 2017) and formalism (Nonsite, January 2017). With Catherine Spencer and Stephanie O’Rourke he co-organises the Tate research network sub-group on ‘Contemporary Art in Scotland’, and with Catherine Spencer and Alistair Rider is co-organising the conference ‘In and Out of American Art: Between Provincialism and Transnationalism, c. 1940–1980’ (St Andrews, 27–28 October 2017).

Alex Thomson (University of Edinburgh): Membership Secretary
Alex Thomson is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures at the University of Edinburgh. He is a former Chair of the Scottish Network of Modernist Studies. He is the author of Deconstruction and Democracy: Derrida’s Politics of Friendship (Continuum, 2005) and Theodor Adorno: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum, 2006), as well as essays on topics in critical theory, and on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Scottish literature. He edits the book series ‘Taking on the Political’ for Edinburgh University Press. Among his current research interests are comparative and transnational perspectives on modernism in Britain, and the changing relationship between the ideas of nation, race, culture, ethnicity in the period.

Jeff Wallace (Cardiff Metropolitan University): Past ChairJeffWallace is Professor of English at Cardiff Metropolitan University. He joined BAMS in 2013, and the BAMS Executive Steering Committee in 2014. He is the author of Beginning Modernism (2011), D.H. Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman (2005), and the co-editor, with Andrew Smith, of Gothic Modernisms (2001). His most recent published work includes an essay, ‘Modern’, in the Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman (eds Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini, 2016), and an article, ‘Murphy and Peace’, in Twentieth-Century Literature (61:3, 2015). He is currently working on a study of abstraction as a critical concept in the literary and visual arts.

Claire Warden (De Montfort University): Secretary
Claire Warden is Reader in Drama at De Montfort University. Her research focuses on modernist art in its broadest sense, theatre history, performance practice, politics and physical culture. She is the author of British Avant-garde Theatre (2012), Modernist and Avant-garde Performance: An Introduction (2015) and the British Academy-funded Migrating Modernist Performance: British Theatrical Travels through Russia (2016), and is co-editor of Performance and Professional Wrestling (2016). Her most recent work includes articles on John Piper (Modernist Cultures, 2016), chapters on Russian directing practice and an edited collection on Raymond Williams and Performance for ‘Keywords’ (2017).

Adam Watt (University of Exeter)
Adam Watt is Associate Professor (Reader) in French at the University of Exeter where he is also Director of Research for Modern Languages. His books include Reading in Proust’s A la recherche: le délire de la lecture (Oxford University Press, 2009);The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust (Cambridge University Press, 2011; Persian edition forthcoming 2017); an illustrated biography, Marcel Proust (Reaktion Books, 2013; Chinese edition, Lijian Publishing, 2015); and, as editor, Marcel Proust in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2013; paperback 2016). He is seeking to develop a network for those working on modernist topics in the South West.

Postgraduate Representatives:

Ruth Clemens (Leeds Trinity) (2017–19)
Ruth Clemens is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Leeds Trinity University, researching the transnationalism and multilingualism of modernist book parts. She was the recipient of the 2015 Association for Low Countries Studies essay prize and in summer 2017 she began a visiting research fellowship at Utrecht University. Ruth has presented conference papers on T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Flann O’Brien, and her work has appeared in BSJ: The B. S. Johnson Journal and the British Library’s European Studies blog.

Gareth Mills (University of Reading) (2018–20)
Gareth Mills is an AHRC funded second year PhD student at the University of Reading, studying Wyndham Lewis and the publishing industry. He is the founder and co-editor of the interdisciplinary academic outreach journal Question (www.questionjournal.com), now in its second issue and available in print in bookshops and libraries in the Southwest, Wales and London. He is a contributing reviewer for the Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies, Journal of Beckett Studies, and the Review of English Studies, and founder and co-organiser of the Modernist Periodicals Reading Group. He co-coordinates the Gender and Sexuality Research Network at Reading and manages its blog.

Séan Richardson (2018–20)
Séan Richardson is a doctoral researcher at Nottingham Trent University focusing on the queer geographies of modernism. He is the host of the Modernist Podcast, the curator of the Forster50 exhibition and the founder of the Midlands Modernist Network.